Forget About Biotech Crops in Bee Disappeances--It's Cellphones!
Ronald Bailey | April 15, 2007, 4:28pm
Last week, I analyzed the Sierra Club scare campaign that suggests that biotech crops might be responsible for colony collapse disorder in which bees are disappearing around the world. Now the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, is reporting that another high tech culprit could be responsible--mobile phones. No, really they are! To wit:
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops... Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left"...
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo , who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."
One problem with the biotech crop theory is that bees are also disappearing in Europe which plants very little in the way of biotech crops. Of course, Europe is chock-a-block with mobile phones. But why now? It's not as though cellphones have just started emitting bee-confusing radio waves in the last year.
Tuskegee University biologist C.S. Prakash wryly notes: As Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Anyway, whole Independent article here.
Kudos to Prakash.
Dave W. | April 16, 2007, 1:53pm | #
Smallpox was not created via GM technology; it is a naturally occurring disease.
More generally, it was caused by a population shift that caused a naturally occurring microbe to become prevalent in a place where it was not prevalent before. However, a population shift is not the only way to cause a microbe to become more prevalent than it was before. The concern is that GM will cause a microbe to become more prevalent it was before. One way is if a genetic change to an animal cause that species to become a vector, when the species was not a vector before.
Another possibility is that a gm change to a species food will cause the species to become a vector. You may want to read up on why hamburgers have more dangerous e coli than they used to. You may also want to read about how trichonosis (sp?) was wiped out in North America, and about ongoing efforts to prevent Mad Cow. True, the dangerous e coli story, the trichonosis story and the Mad Cow story do not necesarily* involve GM changes to the food, but they do demonstrate more generally that changes to the diet, from any source, can have unforeseeable microbe implications.
Some microbe implications are small, like the e coli problem. Others can be big, like smallpox.
Cane toads? How about deer in New Zealand? Species have been and will continue to travel across bioregions on the Earth with or without the help of human beings.
Right, it depends upon how much DNA is being changed and how fast. If DNA is shifted in sequence relatively slowly, then the catastrophes tend to be infrequent and relatively small scale.
As the pace of genetic manipulation picks up, the risk increases.
HIV? So you're back to a naturally occuring virus again.
One that existed for a long time before mankind decided to eat it (or taint a test batch of a vaccine with it, not clear which). Imagine a gm tweak that has us eating a species we didn't used to eat -- a species that was not cost effective as food, but becomes so. How many "naturally occurring" virii do you think mankind will pick up that way? Do you think the new virii acquired in this manner will be as bad as HIV, or more manageable like the bad e coli?
FOOTNOTE:
* actually th e coli problem may implicate gm, because it may have been gm which made the corn cost effective to feed to the cattle, which in turn changes their digestive pH, which, in turn, causes the bad e coli to flourish where it previously did not. Or maybe cows would be fed corn these days irregardless of gm. Tough to say.
